Introduction
If you have a 3x3 Rubik’s cube laying around but don’t know what to do with it, or even if you know how to solve one but your friends are bored of watching you solve it, this blog will help you impress them again.
Before we begin, it is important that you know the notation on the regular 3x3 Rubik’s Cube. If you are an experienced cuber, or just know how to solve a cube, you are probably already very familiar with the official notation, so you can skip this part.
Notation
It is essentially like learning how the pieces in a chess set move. Each face of the cube has a name based on its position (and NOT based on the colour of that side). For example F means the FRONT face and R means the RIGHT face and so on. For the moves, let’s take an example. If we say D, you turn the DOWN face of your cube clockwise, and if we say D’ you turn the DOWN face of your cube anti-clockwise. If we say R2. you turn the right face of your cube two full turns.
You can find a full blog about Rubik’s cube notation here.
Patterns
Let’s start off with some basic patterns. You can take a cube and in any position and apply these moves.
L2 R2 F2 B2 U2 D2
You should have something that looks like this:
This is called the Checkerboard pattern.
After this, you can learn the four center swap. Again, take a cube in any position and do these moves
F2 B2 U D’ R2 L2 U D’
Your cube should look like this.
We can now move on to some advanced patterns that aren’t that easy to memorize
Superflip:
(M’ U) x4 y’ z (M’ U) x4 y’ z (M’ U) x4
Since this notation is quite advanced, here is a short video tutorial that breaks it down to much easier steps:
This position also happens to be the most “difficult" position of the Rubik’s Cube. That being it takes 20 moves to solve this case at best, which is the most number of moves required to solve a Rubik’s Cube, also known as God’s number.
Supercross:
R2 L’ D F2 R’ D’ R’ L U’ D R D B2 R’ U D2
Cube in a Cube in a Cube:
This pattern I feel is the most aesthetically pleasing look on a Rubik’s cube.
U' L' U' F' R2 B' R F U B2 U B' L U' F U R F'
Here is a video tutorial for the cube in a cube across all NxN puzzles:
Finger tricks and triggers (for Intermediate to Advanced Cubers)
Now, getting into the good old-fashioned speedy tricks that you can do, you can learn how to do standard finger tricks and then do some triggers to impress your friends.
For example, you can do R’ F R U’ on your cube 6 times really quickly and see your cube go from solved to scrambled to solved.
Other 4 move triggers include:
- R U R’ U’ x6
- R’ F R F’ x6
- R U’ R’ U x6
You can also impress your friends by doing some fancy PLLs fairly quickly with neat fingertricks.
Some of them are:
- H perm - M2 U M2 U2 M2 U M2 (you can switch the Us with U’ if you do M2 with your right hand)
- Z perm - M2 U’ M2 U’ M’ U2 M2 U2 M’
- J perm - R U R’ F’ R U R’ U’ R’ F R2 U’ R’
- T perm - R U R’ U’ R’ F R2 U’ R’ U’ R U R’ F’
Since you have made it this far, I will be letting you into a secret magic trick, which is probably the most impressive trick in this blog.
This is called the Flip Solve trick: The performer scrambles up the cube carefully showing only 3 sides to the viewer and then quickly flips the cube to make it appear as though it is solved.
How to perform:
Do these moves on your cube - U’ D L2 U B2 D2 B2 D2 L F’ U F’ R U’ F2 L F’ B’
You will notice that 3 faces of the cube appear solved and the other 3 faces don’t. You can also do J perm + U’ 2 times after the scramble to make the viewer think that you are really scrambling the cube.
Then quickly flip the cube to show the viewer the 3 solved sides, amaze them, and scramble up the cube again before they can see the other 3 sides.
Here is a video tutorial for this trick with the timestamp:
That’s all for this blog, hope you enjoy bringing a smile to your friends’ faces with these tricks!
About Author
Shubham Maharana, an all-rounding speedcuber from Mumbai, has over 8 years of experience, starting cubing at 9 and competing at 11. He has won 23 WCA medals across 6 events, including 2nd in India for 2x2 Single and 7th nationally for Sum of Ranks. Shubham also became one of India’s youngest competition organizers at 14.
